This is the third generation of the Standard Schnauzer Club of America's web site.

The first generation was sufficient to make Standard Schnauzer Club of America information available to the SSCA membership and other users, but it was not too user friendly.

The second generation was more user friendly, it contained the same content, and the layout was changed slightly. The navigation was improved, but there was not much "going on behind the scenes" as far as fancy stuff was concerned. Translation web site was adequate but still needed improvement, especially regarding navigation. The problem with navigation was links embedded within pages. It was not obvious or intuitive where those embedded links were located. The setup for these pages used what is called i-frames. This was good for basic web pages, but layouts could be confusing when going from a link in an i-frame to a web page and then back to the i-frame.

The third generation contains major improvements in the navigation and in some of the page layouts. The i-frames were removed which makes future modifications much easier. This latest version of the SSCA web site incorporates more javascript for display purposes. Translation, there are more bells and whistles included in the code. If your computer has Internet Explorer 6 or 7 you will not see any of the new additions the way the pages are designed. If you have the latest versions of FireFox or Opera or Safari, then you will see the new features - round corners on some pictures and warning boxes.

Internet Explorer 6 or 7 were not designed to be web site developer friendly. Microsoft ignored many standards defined for web page development by the World Wide Web Consortium ( aka W3C ). Hence, some web code will not render as expected in Microsoft browsers. So for all of you web surfers living in the past i.e. using Internet Explorer 6 and 7, a warning message is provided to you to upgrade your browser.

The new navigation is now across the top of the page just below the page banner. Click on a link in the top row and the related links appear in the row beneath it. The link for the main or home page has no sub links so the second row contains an informative message. The current message states the number of days remaining until the next national specialty. When the specialty is over, the message will be changed to note some other significant SSCA event.

Tool tips - popup information - is included only with the top menu. These popup tips give the user a brief look at what information is available within the link.

The re-design of the SSCA web site was an on going effort that started in June 2010. If you find anything out of order - mis-spelling, error in a statement, something just does not work, please let your webmaster, know about it. And remember to indicate what browser and browser version you were using at the time.

How I learned to hate Microsoft
The following is for the techies who may have uttered a few expletive deleted's at Microsoft. Most if not all HTML entities - paragraph, table, DIV box, etc. - have a margin, padding, border, and content associated with them. Let us say that I want to define something that is 300 pixels wide ( the height does not matter ) and this 300 pixel width is an absolute value, i.e. the space on the browser that I can occupy with my 'something'. In compliant browsers - those that play by the rules - the margin and padding and border are part of my 300 pixels. I want my 'something' must have the following dimensions:
- margin - left and right - of 12 pixels
- padding - left and right - of 7 pixels
- border - left and right - of 2 pixels

My content - words, images, etc - will now be:
   something = width - ( margin X 2 ) - ( padding x 2 ) - ( border X 2 )
   something = 300 - (12 x 2) - (7 x 2) - (2 x 2 )
   something = 300 - 24 - 14 - 4
   something = 300 - 42 = 258 pixels wide

The dimensions in my style sheet (aka CSS) for FireFox, Safari, Opera, Chrome will look like:

This means that the real space for my 'something' is only 258 pixels wide. In other words, the margin, padding and border are outside of the actual dimension that I specify for my 'something'.

Now, along comes Microsoft and places the margin, padding, and border all inside of my 'something'. The dimensions in my style sheet (aka CSS) for Microsoft will now look like:

For the most part, the margin, padding and border all stay the same, only the width changes. To accomplish the change of dimensions for my 'something' I need to define a style sheet for the different browsers. In order to do this "browser sniffing" the HTML code and javascript must determine what browser the user has and load up the appropriate style sheet. By jumping through all of these hoops, the web page will look the same in all browsers (hopefully).

Regards,

Your Web Master

Stay healthy, scratch your dogs, and smile!